Bob Kerr: Goodness comes in small ways to offer hope and joy

He sits in his wheelchair, smiling, reaching, talking in his way. Johnnel Diaz is 3 years old, and he has moved from the worst to the best of human possibility. Sonia Diaz, Johnnel’s mother, calls it...

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By
Bob Kerr
Posted Oct. 27, 2013 @ 12:01 am

He sits in his wheelchair, smiling, reaching, talking in his way. Johnnel Diaz is 3 years old, and he has moved from the worst to the best of human possibility.

Sonia Diaz, Johnnel’s mother, calls it “a little seed that you give others”, this amazing thing she and her family have done. They have brought Johnnel into their home in Central Falls and made him one of them.

Sonia said she knew from the first time she saw Johnnel during a weekend of respite care that she wanted him to be in her house forever.

“I knew I could make changes,” she said.

Oh, she’s done that all right. She and her husband, Jose, and their three children have reshaped their lives around this little boy who almost died from being left in the wrong place with the wrong person.

In January 2012, Johnnel was with his biological mother, Stephanie Marks, in Superior Court, Providence, where his father, Deanthony Allen, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the maximum sentence for child abuse. On Nov. 13, 2010, Marks was at work as a caretaker in Tiverton. Allen had been watching their four-month-old son in their Pawtucket apartment when, according to the police, he became aggravated with his son’s crying and beat him so severely that the child had two detached retinas, seven fractured ribs, contusions and brain injuries. He was left blind, unable to walk and prone to seizures.

After extensive treatment of his injuries, Johnnel was placed in foster care, which put him on the path to the house on Clay Street in Central Falls. Sonia Diaz had taken two other children into foster care through Boys Town New England and she met Johnnel when she agreed to care for him for a weekend respite for another foster parent.

“I cried a lot for him,” Sonia said. “He was so cute. But he wasn’t moving.”

Now, he sits up, stands and talks. Sonia said he responds more to light each day.

The adoption became final on Sept. 5 after months of foster care on Clay Street and after Stephanie Marks reluctantly surrendered her parental rights.

Now, the day begins when Sonia picks him up from his bed, washes him and dresses him. There is milk and yogurt for breakfast and often pancakes. Pancakes are Johnnel’s favorite.

At 8 a.m., he’s picked up for preschool at the Captain Hunt School in Central Falls.

“I had to work hard for that,” Sonia said. “If you have education, you’re rich. It’s the most important thing.”

On Wednesdays, she goes to the school to watch her son in class with other disabled kids.

He gets home at 2 in the afternoon and goes for a walk, with a walker or with his hand in the hand of a member of his new family.

“I think this way,” Sonia said. “A child like Johnnel, he is why people have faith and love. You have to be committed to be there for him. You have to adapt to changes.”

She noticed as soon as Johnnel arrived that he took a daunting number of medications. She is a certified nursing assistant and a medication aide and said she was able to talk to doctors and eliminate some of the medications.

She likes the way the people at Boys Town encourage her to always do more.

“And 24 hours a day, if we need help we can call and they’ll be here,” she said.

On a dazzling fall morning in Central Falls, Sofie Diaz pulls her wheelchair up next to her new brother’s and reaches out to touch him. Sofie is 20 and has spina bifida.

“He’s a blessing to all of us,” she said of Johnnel. “When I see him, his smile, it brightens up my day.”

It can work this way. The most ignorant, vicious kind of evil can be overcome by an uncommon good. It can be overcome by extraordinary people who don’t think they’re extraordinary at all. They just see a kid who needs what they have. And they give it in the most generous and loving way, again and again.